Eight Hundred Grapes

by Laura Dave

  I turned, expecting to see my father, standing there with a hospital band on his wrist, telling us he was fine. But it was the doctor coming out to see us. The doctor giving my mother a hug, like they were old friends.

  “Jen. He had another heart attack,” he said.

  “Another?” Bobby said.

  “What does he mean another, Mom?” Finn said.

  Which was when I realized what my father hadn’t told me about the car accident, what must have happened. My father had had a heart attack while he was driving, causing that accident.

  The vein popped in Bobby’s neck. “What the hell is going on?” Bobby said.

  My mother jumped in front of him, in front of all of us, her back to us, facing the doctor.

  “What does that mean, exactly?” she asked him. “Is he okay?”

  “It was a mild heart attack, though not as mild as last time. He’s responding to a clot-dissolving agent, but he isn’t out of the woods. I’m not pleased to see him back here. He has to take it easy, Jen. We have talked about this.”

  Bobby looked like he was going to explode. “When did you talk about this? Mom, how did you not tell us that Dad had a heart attack?”

  “We didn’t want to worry you,” she said.

  Finn stood behind his brother. “Why?” Finn said.

  “Yeah, why?” Bobby said.

  Bobby was yelling now, full-on yelling.

  They both were.

  My mother turned toward them, her voice the loudest of all. “We thought you’d overreact! Imagine that. We thought you’d make it about your own fear as opposed to, you know, what your father would need to actually get past it.”

  They both got quiet. Everyone got quiet, and the entire waiting room turned to look at my mother: the Ford family and Ben and Margaret and Jacob and an array of midnight strangers, crowding around. Everyone looked at my mother, who was done with all the nonsense, demanding that the rest of her family be done too.

  “Now it’s time for you to keep your father safe. To keep each other safe. Like you all didn’t forget how.” She moved toward the doctor. “So what does this mean for Dan?”

  The doctor looked back and forth between my brothers to see if they were going to interrupt.

  “He’s resting now. We’ll know more tomorrow, but you should get some rest.”

  Jacob looked down as if it was his fault.

  “So he’s going to be okay?” Finn said.

  My mother caught his eye, trying to calm him.

  “What you’re saying means he’s going to be okay?” Bobby said.

  “It means we watch him until tomorrow. Run a few more tests. But assuming he is fine, he can go home then. Though he’s going to have to take it easy. His body is not going to give him another warning call.”

  Bobby laughed. “Sure. That won’t be an issue at all.”

  My mother put her hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “Bobby . . .”

  “What? Dad has never taken it easy. Ever.”

  The doctor turned and looked at him. Serious. “Until today.”

  My mother nodded and turned to us so we’d hear it, what she was saying in her silence, that it was time for everyone to think differently about our father. “Can we see him?”

  “He said you had a long enough day and you should go home. I think that would be wise. Dan is groggy and could use his rest, and Jen, you need your rest too. He’s right. You can see him first thing in the morning.”

  My mother nodded. “Sure. Okay,” she said. “That makes sense.”

  She turned to me and squeezed my hand.

  Then she walked right past the doctor, toward her husband.

  Sebastopol, California. 2009

  Jen was furious with him and she was right to be. They were spending a month in Big Sur, in a beautiful house, large windows looking out over the ocean. She had told him what she needed. She needed a change and she had said that she’d go on her own. But he had insisted that he go with her.

  That part was fine, but he wasn’t really here. He knew that was what she was furious about. If he was going to barely be here with her, why had he come at all?

  He wasn’t making an effort. She loved everything about being in Big Sur and on the ocean. She had joined a musical theater group and she was playing in the band. It was beyond the fact that all of that made him feel threatened. It was this, if he was truthful. He felt neglected. He wasn’t seeing her at all and he was being a child about it. He knew he was being a child about it. That was different from knowing how to stop.

  “Is it because you’re not feeling well?”

  She asked him this all the time now, since the heart attack.

  “I’m good. I’m really good.”

  “Then it just seems like you’ve forgotten how to do anything other than what you’re doing.” She shook her head. “And the thing is, that was why I fell in love with you. That vision, that passion. But you have to be able to do something else too. You don’t know how to do anything but be at the vineyard.”

  “I know.”

  “And you haven’t tried.”

  He nodded. “I know that too.”

  She was waiting to see what he’d say next.

  “We can sell the vineyard,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  “No one is talking about selling the vineyard, Dan. Why is that all that you hear?”

  She looked at him. And he saw it: The way she had looked at him at the beginning, all that love in her eyes—this looked like the opposite.

  “What are we talking about, then?”

  “Something else,” she said.

  She started walking away, but he held on to her arm. He didn’t say anything, but he held on, hoping she would see what he didn’t seem to know how to say. He was waiting for her to do it, the thing she would do when they were this angry with each other, the thing she was the one who knew how to do.

  He was waiting for her to move back toward him.

  The Details

  Synchronization.

  A fire hit a vineyard. And then, like a miracle, it started to pour. It was overdue to pour but it started then, pressing down at the fire.

  Synchronization. Your heart pumped blood to the necessary vessels. The vessels pumped the blood back to the heart muscle. Everything flowed through the coronary artery to the heart muscle. To where everything was needed.

  An unspoken agreement.

  Ben went back to the house to relieve Michelle. Margaret went with him to be with her twins. They needed her, and it was easier to be with them. She didn’t expect Bobby to go with her. But he did. Bobby went to oversee the grape picking, to do the one thing for my father he felt he could do at that moment. Then Finn left to deal with the fire department, to see what was left of the winemaker’s cottage. By the time my mother came out, there was only me, surrounded by empty seats.

  My mother walked back into the waiting room, carrying an enormous care package.

  “You all alone? How did that happen?”

  “A little bit of luck.”

  She smiled. “Thanks for staying for me,” she said.

  She put the care package down on the seat next to me and took the seat on its other side, exhausted.

  “What a night,” she said.

  “How is he?”

  “He was irritated more than anything else, which seemed like a good sign.”

  “About what?”

  She shrugged. “He wants to get to the grapes.”

  I started to tell her that it was taken care of, that Bobby was handling it, but that wouldn’t have mattered to my father. He would need to be there himself to believe it.

  “He tried to tell me yesterday about the heart attack. I only half-heard him.”

  “He probably only half-told you.”

  I looked d
own, still feeling guilty that I hadn’t known intrinsically what was going on here. And also that I hadn’t been here while it was happening.

  “Don’t do that.”

  I looked at her. “What?”

  “Don’t say this happened again because he’s selling the vineyard,” my mother said. “It’s not. He wanted you to understand that. This is because he didn’t sell it sooner.”

  I nodded. It seemed like she was right. My father had given everything he could to this land. He needed to give himself to something else now. I was done fighting him on that. I was done fighting him on anything, except what he said he wanted for himself.

  My mother smiled. “He said it was a fitting ending.”

  “For the last harvest?”

  “For the last harvest,” my mother said.

  She leaned toward me. “And that was before the fire inspector called. It seems someone left something on the stove in the winemaker’s cottage.”

  She shook her head, laughing. What else was there to do? In the realm of disasters that night, the fire was lower on the list. Higher on the list was this: She looked happy. She looked happier than she should in a hospital waiting room. She looked happier than she had since I’d walked in the door in my wedding dress, her in her towel. Two different lifetimes.

  And I saw it creep over her face, the rest of it, what she had to do. What was required of her. She needed to leave Henry, if she was going to reimagine her life with my father.

  She looked down. “Henry is a good man,” she said. “When I told you how Henry made me feel, how he made me feel seen, I left that part out.” She shook her head. “One of these days, I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  “How does it end, Mom?”

  She paused. “With your father. It ends with your father.”

  I took a deep breath in. “The details don’t matter, then.”

  She shook her head. “The details matter,” she said. “It’s the big picture that confuses us.”

  What were the details of today? What was the big picture? The big picture was that my mother made sacrifices. We all did, didn’t we? Hers caught up. But now she was trying to let them go for what she had gotten in return.

  My mother leaned forward. “Ben works hard to understand you,” she said. “It doesn’t mean he’s good at it. But it’s important that he tries. Sometimes all you need is a man to remind you he’s doing the best he can.”

  My initial thought was that Ben did more than the best he could. He succeeded in knowing what I needed, often before I did. Except then I thought about the enormity of what he had kept from me, his daughter, her mother’s feelings for him, his feelings for her. An entire other life he was living. If he really understood me, wouldn’t he know that what I needed most—what I wanted in my new family—was what I had in my first family? What we still had? It was a mess and we fought and battled and lost it and made bad decisions for one another. But we put it on the table. We put one another first. Ben had done the opposite.

  My mother pointed toward the care package. “Jacob dropped this. He left it outside your father’s door. I don’t know how he got back there. It doesn’t matter. Jacob left this.”

  “He did?”

  She opened the wrapping. “He wanted to make sure your father was okay. And, like a man, he brought everything we didn’t exactly need.” She held up a box of licorice as an example. “Doing the best he can.”

  She was quiet.

  My mother put her arm around me. “Can we go home and go to sleep? I feel like I could sleep for five days straight. And I probably should. I should probably rest up so I can be back here in five hours.”

  I nodded. That I could do for my father. I could take his wife home and get her some rest.

  “FYI. The last time I felt this shitty, I was pregnant with you.”

  I smiled. “Are you going to tell me what Dad said to you? When he whispered in your ear.”

  “Do you think that’s what turned everything around? You think it’s as simple as that?”

  “I’m just nosy.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears, considering what he said, whether she was going to share it. Then she smiled.

  “Your father said the same thing he said when he got into my yellow buggy.”

  “What was that?”

  She shrugged. “So, where are you taking me?”

  She shook her head, taking a stick of licorice, taking a large bite. Then she stood up to go, care package in hand, my arm over her shoulder as we headed out the hospital door.

  “It’s not all a happy ending. We’re going to have to get you a new tent,” she said.

  I looked at her, confused, at which point she rolled her eyes, like she couldn’t believe she had to explain this.

  “A new tent for your wedding. Rain damaged it. Rain and wind and everything else that a tent like that is supposed to stand up to, but doesn’t.”

  She leaned in, as if listening to my heart, as if listening to how that made my heart feel.

  “Not tonight, though.” She shook her head. “Nothing is open tonight.”

  The First Contract

  When I got back to the vineyard, I went down to the winemaker’s cottage, the back of it burned off, Bobby sitting on the porch. He was sitting alone, drinking a beer. At 5:55 in the morning.

  He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on our vineyard, the sun not yet lighting it. The fog still dusting the vines, laminating them in frost and half-light.

  Bobby stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed and confused, the stare of someone who had been up all night. “You may as well sit down,” he said. “There’s half a beer left, and I don’t think anything is going to collapse.”

  He moved over and handed up the bottle of beer. I had a sip, taking a seat.

  “Long night,” he said. “We got half of the grapes. We can use half of them.”

  “It could have been worse, then,” I said.

  “It also could have been better,” he said. He paused. “Mom back?”

  “Yeah. She went upstairs to go to sleep.”

  “Good. She must be exhausted.”

  Then he took his beer back, even though I was mid-sip, which was when I noticed he had Band-Aids on his fingers, over the nails.

  Bobby shrugged, looking down at them. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

  Then he took a sip, turning back to the vineyard. The morning glaze holding in the sky, intoxicating him. It was comforting, the way this place got more beautiful every day. Wasn’t that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you’d been during the time that you had been living there. The many ways it had brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.

  “Margaret went back to San Francisco with the twins just a few minutes ago. They were asleep but I helped her load them in the car. They didn’t make a move. We’re good at that. The two of us. You’d be surprised how much skill that takes.”

  I reached for the beer, took a small sip, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say, and I didn’t want to upset him more than he had already been upset these past few days.

  He took the beer back. “We talked before she went. We decided I would stay here for a minute with Mom and Dad. We decided to take a minute apart to see if that would help us remember how much we used to love being together. That’s the plan at least.”

  He was holding the beer or I’d have handed it back to him, just so he could have something to do besides sitting there, telling me his family was falling apart before him.

  “I made a mess of things,” he said.

  “I don’t think you should be blaming yourself.”

  He laughed, a little angry. “What should I be doing?”

  I shrugged. “Drinking?”
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  He smiled, took another sip. “She’s not wrong. I stopped paying attention to her. I stopped doing the things that someone does for the person he loves. Because I was tired. Because other things always seemed to matter a little bit more.”

  He paused.

  “That doesn’t happen overnight, you know. It happens slowly. You should be careful of that. You should be careful not to take the person you love for granted. Not only because they’ll notice. But you’ll notice too. You’ll think it means something it doesn’t.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that’s how much you care.”

  He looked like he had lost everything. If Margaret saw that, would it be enough? Bobby loved his wife in a way she couldn’t feel, but he loved her all the same. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t the effort, no matter how misinformed, be enough to keep people together—especially at the moment they might otherwise decide it was easier to be apart?

  He took a swig. “I’m mad at her. It doesn’t help, but I am mad at her and him.”

  “Me too.”

  “That really doesn’t help.”

  I moved closer to him. “What are you going to do?”

  “Make it up to her if I can. Forgive her if I can. Help her forgive me.” He shook his head. “Something like that.”

  “That sounds like a plan.”

  “What choice do I have?”

  He put down the beer, rubbed his hands together.

  “You don’t give up on a family. Not without trying to put it back together.”

  That stopped me. My brother, who always said the wrong thing, had said the most important thing of all.

  His words vibrated in the place that had gone vacant the minute I’d seen Ben on the street in my wedding dress. With Maddie. With Michelle.

  I hugged him. “Thank you.”

  He looked confused. “For what?”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do about Ben, and you just made it feel very clear. Thank you for that.”

  “You should marry him. You’d be an idiot not to.”

  And then there was that. I laughed, even though he wasn’t kidding. And leaned forward, squeezing into my brother.